Almost every sign of every domain in the country betrays the rot. The irony is that those who came to power to eliminate so called excesses were caught wallowing in mud in a pigsty, not at their cost, but at the cost of the nation. Their words and deeds made people believe that they were merely incompetent in governance and not more; lo and behold, even worse, the lot seems to have steamrolled the governance structure as emerging evidence of former State Minister Ranjan Ramanayake’s video leaks leads people to assume.
If a minion of the Yahapalanaya regime could behave in such a way as to influence even the selection of appeal court judges and indulge in other interferences, as the leaks indicate, what those of the Yahapalanaya top hierarchy would have done to prevent justice dispensation could be anybody’s guess. Some NGO pundits seem to have been agitated over the privacy issue of recording private conversations, while keeping mum on the implications of the revelations which may be just a gimmick to gloss over the shocking decadence wrought by those who came to power on their back. The gravamen of the whole issue is why they stoop to such a level as to undermine the integrity of the judiciary.
Perhaps, they might have thought that as they came to power in 2015 by promising the people to catch big timedeflectors, they would never prove that the government before 2015 had such crooks, under proper political behaviour without influencing the judiciary.
Only now after these revelations, that people will realise the predicaments former Minister of Justice Wijeydasa Rajapakshe had to undergo until he was stripped of his portfolio, to stem the onslaught against an independent judiciary, effected by his Yahapalanaya companions to dispense its version of justice.
Governance hinges on three branches: the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. According to the concept of separation of powers, although the remit of the executive and the legislature can overlap, the judiciary must be kept away from any interference from the other branches of governance.
Sri Lanka has a mixed system of governance of the Presidential system and the Westminster system. The president who is elected at a presidential election considering the whole country as one electorate is the head of the Executive or the head of the Cabinet with other ministers selected from Parliament who are elected to the legislature, considering the district as an electorate. The judiciary is purely an independent body established without any interference from the executive or the legislature for the dispensation of justice.
As evidence indicates, those who connected to the executive have interfered with justice dispensation, putting the whole system into jeopardy. The implications of the undermining of justice dispensation may not be limited to the country and may have repercussions in the international arena as well. The very act of interfering with the judiciary may be just a minor achievement in destructive elements’ efforts to undermine sovereignty in Sri Lanka.
Citizens are alarmed that LTTE sympathisers in the country and around the world are hell bent to criminalise the Sri Lankan forces that eliminated LTTE terrorism which caused destruction for nearly three decades and terror which haunts people with ghoulish memories of the Grim Reaper even after a decade.
There is a popular fiction behind the rise of the LTTE authored by racist northern politicians, according to which the masses in the south have discriminated against their northern counterparts. Instead, discerning people can witness that some racist northern politicians were the ones who held the masses in the north hostage by being non-cooperative towards development efforts by the governments and by segregating the people on caste and other man-made status-linked differences to grab distressed people’s votes. For the purpose, they spun yarns to incite northern masses and tried to pit them against their southern brethren with part success.
In 2015, the Yahapalanaya government cosponsored a resolution at the United Nations Human Rights Council, Geneva, which among other things demands that the Sri Lankan government establish special courts with foreign judges to look into so called excesses by the Sri Lanka armed forces during the war against terrorism. In this scenario, it is essential for conspirators to lay the ground work for such an exercise in that they have to prove that the country’s judiciary is not independent and bent under political pressure.
The previous regime knowingly or unknowingly has facilitated such conspirators to tamper with the independence of the judiciary assisted by the predatory NGO cohort that works in collusion with LTTE sympathisers. The campaign of LTTE proxies outside Sri Lanka has intensified against the country’s unitary state after the LTTE’s military defeat at the hands of the armed forces. Since then, they have selected the UNHCR as the best launch pad to blitzkrieg the Sri Lankan governments, especially when those who trounced the LTTE are in power.
Meanwhile, Sri Lanka’s long time friend in the UK Lord Naseby has repeatedly demonstrated that allegations against Sri Lanka at the UNHRC are baseless, even quoting reliable diplomatic dispatches. But the Yahapalanaya government didn’t give two hoots to his candid efforts to present the true case and went along with its pernicious resolutions.
Lord Naseby addressing the House of Lords recently said, “We’ve now got two new leaders, one here in the UK with the drive, determination and commitment and you have an almost identical philosophy in the newly elected Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a man of proven leadership an ability with an agenda to keep the peace to keep an inclusive policy for minorities..... I see huge opportunities for trade - my noble friend Lord Sheikh raised some of them, I concur with those. There is a huge opportunity but only...ONLY if the UNHRC project is wound up. I say to the house and my noble friend on the front bench - this year is the year for UK to have faith in Sri Lanka and its newly elected executive president.”
Another aspect of the big picture is that there is an anarchist and hippy-like group for whom governance is toxic. Their ideological and financial sustenance are freely propped up by foreign funded NGOs, whose objective of weakening governance is coterminous with theirs.
Now that the damage has been done, the onus on the authorities is to recreate confidence in the people of the judiciary and demonstrate to the world that Sri Lanka is a country with an independent judiciary.
The salutary effect amid the grim picture is that the people have seen light at the end of the tunnel in President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on whom they have pinned their hope to surgically remove the rotten core.